treasure were poured forth like water in defence of the rights of outraged humanity; whose natural bulwarks, defying the leagued navies of the world, swept them from the ocean; whose perseverance in the combat for life and death was finally crowned with a triumph glorious beyond all example; and whose extended possessions, power, influence, and commerce in every quarter of the globe have made her the object of universal envy! We see her, great in peace as in war, steadily pursuing the noble career which she has marked out for herself at home, quietly giving the needful repairs to the antique fabric of her constitution, and encouraging the improvement of the social condition and institutions of her people; abroad, scattering the germs of future empires, and proclaiming in her colonies to all the nations of the earth, republican or monarchical, that slavery cannot exist under the beneficent rule of the British sceptre. Such are the Rights of Man, in behalf of which Britain lifts her voice and lavishes her treasure! It The French Revolution indeed is and ever will remain one of those great landmarks of History which cannot be contemplated without awe and astonishment. commences an era distinguished by all that is most sublime and all that is most degrading in human nature, by resplendent virtues and prodigious crimes; an era, the ever-varying realities of which surpass the most daring flights of the wildest imagination; an era in which the destructive machinery of war has been worked on a scale that reminds us of the fabled millions of a Xerxes, or the countless hordes led by an Attila, a Jenghiz Khan, and a Tamerlane; an era in which social improvement has been advanced by splendid inventions and discoveries in a degree and with a rapidity that have no parallel in the history of mankind. Amidst these multifarious events, we find sounder principles of government forcing themselves upon rulers, and juster notions of their rights diffused among subjects; and if the ferment which they have excited in men's minds has not every where wholly subsided, we are at least authorised to expect from it in the end results conducive to rational liberty and social happiness. Such is the era of which the historian of "Our Own Times" aims at furnishing a faithful and impartial record, a book of every-day reference for all classes, to which the young may turn for information, and the old to refresh their memories respecting scenes which they have witnessed, or in which perchance they have even been actors. I have no hesitation to add that my ambition is not limited to this kind of usefulness. At a time when among us principles are openly professed and doctrines actively propagated not very dissimilar to those which led in the neighbour-country to the destruction of the throne, to the proscription of the aristocracy, to the overthrow of the church and of religion itself, to rapine, massacre, and anarchy, in short, to the dissolution of all the ties that bind society togetherthis picture, methinks, holds forth an awful lesson, fraught with warnings too plain to be mistaken, too solemn to be disregarded. To the philosophic mind an interesting subject for speculation is presented by the striking contrast between the character of the revolution in England in the seventeenth century and that of the French revolution at the close of the eighteenth: the one attended with little effusion of blood, beyond that spilt in fair fight; the other stained with sanguinary proscriptions, wholesale butcheries, and unmitigated horrors of every kind. It is a curious observation that in none of the northern nations of Europe who are descended from Teutonic tribes, and derive their languages from one common source-the Germans, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, and the inhabitants of Great Britain-is there that innate spirit of reckless cruelty which possesses the people of the southern division of our continent, the Italians, the French, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, whose characters and languages spring from the Roman root-a spirit which feels no compunction about means, so they but lead to the proposed end, whether they be poison or the stiletto, dragonnades or the Inquisition, open violence or midnight massacre-a spirit so conspicuous in Cæsar and Napoleon, in the Borgias and Innocent III., in Charles IX. and Philip II., in Louis XIV. and the Paris Septembrisers, in Marat, Danton, and Robespierre. This essential difference of character, as far as the French and English nations are concerned, had not escaped the discriminating eye of the illustrious Edmund Burke; but it is probable that he had not carried the comparison any further. When, in 1791, the plan of a constitution for Canada was discussed in the House of Commons, Burke admitted that it behoved the British legislature to pay great attention to the constitution of the United States, that the people of Canada might find in it nothing to envy. "But," he continued, "it is plain that they have not the same elements for the enjoyment of republican freedom which exist in the United States. The people of America have a constitution as well adapted to their character and circumstances as they could have; but that character and these circumstances essentially differ from those of the French Canadians. The Americans have derived from their Anglo-Saxon descent a certain quantity of phlegm, of old English good-nature, that fits them better for a republican government. They had also a republican education their internal form of administration was republican; and they were trained to government by war, not by plots, murders, and assassinations." It is almost superfluous to remark that the final allusion was directed against the leaders of the French revolution; who, as it will be shown in the next volume of this work, which will comprehend what is emphatically styled the Reign of Terror, not only continued to pursue the same ruthless means to accomplish their ambitious designs, but absolutely revelled in blood, slaughter, and devastation, like so many incarnate demons specially commissioned to exterminate the hu man race. |